Background

Ethnicity: Catherine Zeta-Jones is of Welsh and Irish descent.

Catherine Zeta-Jones was born on September 25, 1969, in Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom to the family of David Jones and Patricia Fair. Zeta was her middle name; she added the hyphen later. Her name comes from her grandmothers; her maternal grandmother was Catherine Fair and on her father's side Zeta Jones. The name Zeta is of Greek origin. Zeta-Jones' father owned a factory that manufactured sweets while her mother used to be a seamstress. She has two siblings; both of them brothers David and Lyndon. She made her acting debut as a child, playing the lead in Annie at Swansea's Grand Theatre. She also starred in a production of Bugsy Malone, and at 14 impressed Mickey Dolenz when he auditioned her for a role in The Pyjama Game. Dolenz gave her the opportunity to join the show for the rest of its tour.

Education

Catherine Zeta-Jones was a performer right from the time she was a child and enrolled at the Hazel Johnson School of Dance at the age of five. She was also the main performer in the theatre group of her local church. Zeta-Jones was a British tap-dancing competition as well when she was 11 years old. Zeta-Jones studied at the Dumbarton House School located in her native Swansea but she dropped out of school without obtaining her O-Levels and instead relocated to London in order to become an actor. It was something that she had always intended to do. She attended the Arts Educational School in Chiswick to study musical theatre for three years.

Career

At age 15 Catherine Zeta-Jones quit school and moved to London to pursue a career in acting. Her first major onstage role came two years later in a West End revival of the musical 42nd Street when both the lead and the first understudy for the role were unable to perform; the producer of the musical then made her the lead for the remainder of the production run. It was not until she landed the role of Mariette Larkin in the popular British television comedy-drama series The Darling Buds of May during the early 1990s, however, that Zeta-Jones became well known in England. Her popularity made her a frequent target of the media; after a particularly harrowing incident in which she drove her car into a lamppost while trying to elude the paparazzi, Zeta-Jones moved to the United States.

Zeta-Jones relocated to Los Angeles but initially found it difficult to gain a foothold in Hollywood films. She starred instead in made-for-television movies. Her performance in one such project, the 1996 miniseries Titanic, caught the eye of director Steven Spielberg, who thought she would be suitable for a leading role in his then-upcoming production of The Mask of Zorro (1998). After this breakthrough, Zeta-Jones went on to star opposite Sean Connery in the thriller Entrapment (1999) and to portray the wife of a drug dealer in Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning drama Traffic (2000). Zeta-Jones appeared in the romantic comedy High Fidelity in 2000, the same year she married actor Michael Douglas.

In 2002 Zeta-Jones starred as the homicidal entertainer Velma Kelly in the film adaptation of the popular Broadway musical Chicago. Her singing and dancing skills impressed critics and audiences and helped her win an Oscar. She subsequently appeared in several comedies, including Intolerable Cruelty (2003), in which she played a cunning gold digger opposite George Clooney, and The Terminal (2004), a film directed by Spielberg and featuring Tom Hanks. In 2004 she starred with Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon in Ocean's Twelve, a sequel to the blockbuster Ocean's Eleven (2001).

During the latter half of the 2000s, Zeta-Jones's film work became more sporadic, although The Legend of Zorro (2005) and the romantic comedy No Reservations (2007) provided her with prominent roles. She returned the following decade in such films as the 1980s-set rock musical Rock of Ages (2012) and the romantic comedy Playing for Keeps (2012). In 2013 Zeta-Jones appeared in the crime thrillers Broken City, as the glamorous wife of a corrupt politician, and Side Effects, as a secretive psychotherapist. Also that year she played a Russian spy in the action-comedy RED 2. She then returned to television, portraying the actress Olivia de Havilland in the anthology series Feud and the drug trafficker Griselda Blanco in the TV movie Cocaine Godmother (both 2017). She later starred in the series Queen America (2018-2019).

Achievements

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  Catherine Zeta-Jones is one of the most recognizable actresses in the world and throughout her stellar career, she has delivered some of the most memorable performances in the industry. Zeta-Jones' most famous performance came a few years later when she appeared in the film ‘Chicago’ and that remains one of the most iconic performances in her career. In 2009 Zeta-Jones made her Broadway debut in a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music. For her performance as the Swedish actress Desirée, she won a Tony Award in 2010. The following year Zeta-Jones was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Works

More photos

• movie

  • The Legend of Zorro

    (Alejandro's secret life as the masked hero Zorro unravels...)

    2005
  • Entrapment

    (Following the theft of a valuable piece of artwork, Gin B...)

    1999
  • Rock of Ages: Extended Edition

    (In 1987 Los Angeles, an infamous rock star and a legendar...)

    2012
  • Chicago

    (The hit stage musical becomes a multiple-Oscar winning fi...)

    2002
  • Splitting Heirs

    (Accidentally switched while toddlers, a brash American an...)

    1993
  • High Fidelity

    (Music-obsessed record-store manager John Cusack tries to ...)

    2000
  • Intolerable Cruelty

    (Slick divorce lawyer sets up alluring golddigger in court...)

    2003
  • Blue Juice

    (A British surfer in his late twenties is forced to face a...)

    1995
  • Christopher Columbus: The Discovery 1992
  • The Mask of Zorro 1992

Religion

Zeta-Jones grew up Catholic and got her to start acting in a Catholic performance troupe. She seems to continue to practice her childhood faith. She's a fan of wearing elaborate and expensive crucifixes, which drew the criticism of a charity organization based in the Vatican. After her husband, actor Michael Douglas, recovered from throat cancer, she said her "prayers were answered." And she at least at one point was making plans to baptize her children. Despite all this, her husband identifies as Jewish and she said once that she wasn’t necessarily going to raise her children Catholic, but just let them decide what path to take. And she wasn’t married in a church, or even in a religious ceremony at all. Her wedding was performed in a hotel by a judge. So while she appears to be a practicing Catholic, she does not do everything by the book and doesn’t seem to mind that those she loves don't share her faith.

Politics

There's not much information out there about Zeta-Jones' political beliefs, but she's rather liberal based on one little comment. She seemed a little miffed when asked what she thought about the 2012 presidential election in the summer of that year. She reminded the reporter that she cannot vote in the United States and votes in her own country. Then she said, "There really is a ridiculous amount of money wasted on campaigning over here. You know, we [British people] just get down to business, don't we? You vote and then it's done. This goes on for two years, it's ridiculous. I can't wait until November when it's all over and Obama is back in."

Views

Zeta-Jones supports a number of charities and causes. She is a patron of Swansea's Longfields Day Centre for the disabled and has made big donations to the center. In 2001, she auctioned an outfit she wore in The Mask of Zorro to collect money for AIDS patients in Africa. In 2005, she became the ambassador of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children charity and launched the Full Stop appeal in Wales to raise awareness on child abuse. She also supported other charitable organizations for children such as the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and the Noah's Ark Appeal, among others. She is also the founding host for A Fine Romance, an annual charitable program that helps raise funds for the Motion Picture and Television Fund and is one of the members of the Cinema for Peace Foundation.

Quotations: "I used to go around looking as frumpy as possible because it was inconceivable you could be attractive as well as be smart. It wasn't until I started being myself, the way I like to turn out to meet people, that I started to get any work."

"I was a chorus girl. That's all I ever wanted - to be onstage. I would queue up for auditions and then change my costume or put on a different leotard and audition again. It might take me two tries, but I always got the job. I figured out what they wanted."

"For marriage to be a success, every woman and every man should have her and his own bathroom. The end."

Personality

In 2010, Zeta-Jones put work aside to support her husband through a difficult time: He successfully battled throat cancer, but the family crisis put a strain on them all. The following year, Zeta-Jones sought treatment for bipolar II, a type of manic depression, also publicly acknowledging that she had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. At the time, she told InStyle magazine, "I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops but, with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it is completely controllable." In April 2013, Zeta-Jones again checked into a treatment center for help with her illness.

Interests

• dancing

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

• Writers

  Dylan Thomas, Sue Monk Kidd

• Artists

  Alberta Ferretti

• Sport & Clubs

  golf

• Music & Bands

  Gladys Knight, Elvis Presley, Van Morrison, Bonnie Tyler

Connections

In 1998, Zeta-Jones met fellow actor Douglas at the Deauville American Film Festival. According to several reports, soon after they were introduced, he told her, "I want to father your children." The pair soon became a couple, despite a 25-year age difference. They welcomed their first child together, son Dylan, in August 2000, and later that year they married at New York City's posh Plaza Hotel. In 2003, she and Douglas added to their family with the arrival of daughter Carys. That August, it was revealed that she and her husband were going through a difficult time. The pair decided to take "some time apart to evaluate and work on their marriage," according to a statement given to The Huffington Post by their spokesperson. It was reported later that year that they had reconciled.

Father:

David Jones

Mother:

Patricia Fair

husband:

Michael Douglas

Son:

Dylan Michael Douglas

Daughter:

Carys Zeta Douglas

Friend:

Bonnie Tyler

Friend:

Pam Ferris

colleague:

Sean Connery

colleague:

Antonio Banderas

colleague:

George Clooney

References

• Catherine Zeta Jones
  2002
• All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical Chicago
  2018
• Catherine Zeta-Jones Quotes: 50+ Notable Quotes By Catherine Zeta-Jones You Should Know
  2019